POTTERING around his north London home, Bob Hoskins looks supremely relaxed. A faint smile plays on his lips; here is a man at ease with himself. I have been greeted at the front door by a small, yapping dog. 'Don't mind 'im,' says Hoskins nonchalantly. 'Abaht as menacing as a bag of Brussels sprouts, he is.' Having calmed the pooch, he pads around on the thick grey carpet, organises mugs of tea and settles down in a comfy chair, satisfied. On screen, Hoskins has often been hypertension made flesh: eyes ablaze, veins standing out on his neck and forehead, a small aggressive man whose body can barely contain his fury. Not here, though.

He tells me readily how much he likes being at home: he loves to cook, he loves being around his children (Rosa, 13, and Jack, 11). 'I spend much more time around them than a nine-to-fiver,' he says. 'I try to make it a policy never to work during their school holidays. And even when I'm away on a film set, they come to see me and stay with me. Linda [his second wife] always gets it together, if only for a weekend. So the kids get to visit places most kids don't get to go.'

Earlier this year, he tells me, he was filming a version of Balzac's Cousin Bette in Bordeaux with Jessica Lange, and Linda and their children visited for a week. 'We had a wonderful time. The coastline was superb, we went right into the heart of wine country, the kids loved it. The director wanted me to stick around, help build up on my part on my days off, but I told him, "That's why I took this job, for the days off." ' He smirks, then his face clouds briefly. 'But it's not ideal, working a long way from home.' Which is why, at the age of 54, he has closed one particular chapter of his career, and now aims to spend more time in Britain.

It's disorientating to hear Hoskins confide this. The brain whirrs to locate an apparent lack of logic in the announcement. After a few seconds, it kicks in: surely he already spends most of his time in Britain? Not just in the privacy of his home, but in the corner of any British living-room with a TV set. It feels as if Hoskins has been intoning 'It's good to talk' on BT's behalf since Jim Callaghan was in 10 Downing Street - the catchphrase is as familiar a feature of TV's landscape as the bongs of News At Ten or the brass-band pastiche of the Coronation Street theme.

And since it's British Telecom whose wares Bob Hoskins is talking up, it follows he'd shoot their adverts in Britain, yes? Well, no, as it happens. So keen are the chaps at BT to keep their star huckster happy that they jump through hoops to accommodate him. Practically, this means that if Hoskins is filming in, say, New York, the BT commercial crew flies to him. 'They call and say, "Oi! When you got a day off filming then, Bob?" ' he rasps in a symphony of cockney glottal stops. ' "We'll come out." ' He chuckles. 'So they get a good trip. And, É'

He neglects to finish the sentence. Hoskins rarely needs to explore the frontiers of his dramatic talent at BT's behest. He says his lines, someone yells 'Cut!' and back home a sizeable cheque awaits. Easy. 'We've got it down to a fine art,' he says. 'They get some really good directors, you know. Ridley Scott did the first three. Richard Loncraine, who did Richard III, he's done some. BT's executives never show up on set, they leave us alone. One commercial took us 10 minutes! It was one take, that's it, goodbye. Now we're at a stage where we say, "Better shoot this scene after lunch, know what I mean?" Got to look busy, incha?'

It is a refreshing truth about Bob Hoskins that, unlike many actors, he is not remotely snobbish about his commercials and feels no need to apologise for them. 'They're wonderful, terrific,' he shouts. 'And listen: they've paid for this house!' He glances round his study in the basement of his high, handsome, double-fronted Victorian pile near Chalk Farm. The top floor offers spectacular vistas of London. He bought the place four years ago in dilapidated condition and spent a fortune renovating it before moving in. You can see why he won't say a bad word against BT. Still, the curtain is about to descend on the phrase 'It's good to talk'. Not before time, many of us think. 'People are getting really bored with it,' says Hoskins - to my relief, because it saves me saying it. 'It's getting to the stage where I'm known just as the telephone man. So I've told BT I won't do any more.'

For here's an irony - the more Hoskins has become associated with an ad campaign stressing the virtues of communication, the more people have stopped communicating with him. 'Never used to be the case,' he says dolefully. 'I'm not a celebrity type, people don't think of me as a film star, so they'd come up to me, have a chat. Now I've done BT all this time, people shout, "Listen, you sell those f***ing phones, come round my house, tell my daughter to get off the phone," know what I mean? Other people come creeping up to me, go "Iss good ter tawk", and scamper off laughing.' He shakes his head, bemused. 'So I'll last till Christmas, then I'm out.'

It's also odd that at the point Hoskins decides to base himself more firmly here, he will start to recede from our TV screens. Yet his homecoming is not only a warm embrace of Britain, but also a retreat from the artistically barren wastes of Hollywood, which sustained him for a decade.

His Tinseltown odyssey started full of promise. By the time he made a bow in American movies in the mid-Eighties, Hoskins had already dazzled in three different media in Britain: on TV as Arthur, the sheet-music salesman who frequently burst into song in Dennis Potter's innovative Pennies From Heaven; as the riveting, menacing Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, one of only a handful of classic British gangland movies; and triumphantly as Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre's landmark production of Guys and Dolls. He was in his prime, and ready to go west.

In truth, he never looked the part. Hoskins stands five-foot-five and is shaped like a spark plug, with a thick neck, powerful shoulders, a quantifiable paunch and little hair to speak of. He looked what he was - a cocky, working-class hero who had done a spell as a Covent Garden porter. You could picture him flogging watches from a suitcase on Oxford Street, one eye open for the law. But the big screen?

None of it mattered, and he duly made his mark. Plotted on a graph, his Hollywood career is regular in shape: a gradual rise, then a gentle descent. He carried off a creditable American accent in Coppola's The Cotton Club, and appeared in the costly if unsuccessful Alan Alda comedy, Sweet Liberty. Ducking back to Britain for the film that won him an Oscar nomination - Mona Lisa, playing a small-time gangster - he returned to the States for his highest-profile role yet, acting with a group of animated characters he couldn't even see, in the megahit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

That was the zenith. On the downhill path was the charming Mermaids (which implausibly cast him as Cher's lover), Spielberg's overblown Hook and the routine Heart Condition and Shattered. Then, in the wretched Super Mario Brothers, he hit bottom as a video-game character in human form. He arrived on the expensive set to find the script, which he had found tolerable, changed radically. Throughout filming he bickered constantly with its directors. And he decided to kiss Hollywood goodbye. 'I'd been coasting for quite a few years,' he confesses. 'And Super Mario Brothers really brought it home. It was the one film I did just for money [$2 million, reportedly], and it was such an unhappy experience. It was appalling, a joke. And it came out at the same time as Jurassic Park, which buried it. I thought to myself: what am I doing? I'm taking jobs to pay for things which if I didn't take the jobs, I wouldn't have them to pay for. I'm better than this. I can act. I can do the business.

'It's that terrible thing when you take a job you know you wouldn't have taken the year before. And you know next year you'll accept one you wouldn't accept now. I'm not thinking in terms of integrity. It's acting, not life or death. But there are things I do well. And no one was asking me to do anything well. The studios are buying a name I've built up from doing things well - but now, what are they buying?'

So now Hoskins is launching a two-pronged assault on Britain. One prong is entering the film-making business with British producer Norma Heyman (Dangerous Liaisons, Buster and the recent, ill-fated Mary Reilly). Together, under the banner of Heyman-Hoskins Productions ('Sounds like H-h-h-h-hancock's Half-Hour, dunnit?' he chirps), they have made a film version of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, about an anarchists' cell in Edwardian London. He stars alongside Patricia Arquette and Gerard Depardieu. Christopher Hampton, fresh from the success of his directorial debut Carrington, has written the screenplay and directed. Hoskins and Heyman go back 15 years. She produced and he appeared in The Honorary Consul, a flop with Richard Gere and Michael Caine, adapted (again by Hampton) from a Graham Greene novel. 'Norma's mad as a March hare, but wonderful,' he says. 'Once she gets behind a film, she's 100 per cent behind it.'

So how did he assume the mantle of producer? 'I read The Secret Agent as a kid. It was one of my favourite books. I was driving down to the country a couple of years back and heard it as a book on tape, with Tim Pigott-Smith reading. And Tim gave it such a performance! I thought, "Whooo, this is a film."

'I went to Norma and said, "Have you thought of this?" Chris wrote the first draft of a script, really filleted the book down. Then we couldn't find a way to raise the money. But Norma kept trying and finally she got it. Then she said, "Right, you're my partner." '

Hoskins is prouder of The Secret Agent than anything he has done in years. 'It may be a film that never earns a penny, but it's a film we wanted to make. It really is bleak. I mean, it's Joseph Conrad, it's not a Saturday night out with the missus.'

He may be right to harbour modest expectations; his previous ventures behind the camera have not overwhelmed cinema box offices. One could travel far and wide before meeting anyone who saw The Raggedy Rawney, his 1987 film about a group of gypsies in Eastern Europe caught up in a bloody war. And Rainbow, a film for children that he starred in and directed, opened this year and sank into obscurity.

Now, as if deliberately compounding a precarious venture, Hoskins is also returning to the stage for the first time in 15 years. He opens next Wednesday at the Gielgud Theatre in London in Old Wicked Songs, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama by Jon Marans, playing an elderly and passionate Austrian voice-teacher charged with reinvigorating the life and career of a young, burnt-out American piano virtuoso.

Cynics might conclude that Hoskins, no longer able to cut the mustard in Hollywood, is just returning to familiar terrain. But Old Wicked Songs is no easy option by any stretch of the imagination. The play's structure echoes a cycle of songs, Dichterliebe, adapted by Schumann from Heinrich Heine's love poems. 'About 40 per cent of the play is music,' says Hoskins tensely. 'And I have a voice like a foghorn. Singing Guys and Dolls is one thing. Singing Schumann's quite another. And then I have to speak German a fair bit. And the play is nine scenes. In one room.' He sighs deeply. 'It's such a tough 'un. Every time I think about doing it, it gives me the horrors.'

Of course, actors embellish the fear involved in their work; it makes them look heroic in a job that is anything but. Yet Hoskins's worry seems real. I had already been warned by his PRs that he was terrified at the prospect of Old Wicked Songs. He insisted we met at his home in the evening, two hours after daily rehearsals were over, because he needed to separate from the play in space and time to regain his poise.

This panic is at odds with his diamond-geezer image; you don't expect a tough little nut like Hoskins to suffer such inner torment. Then you recall that he suffered a nervous breakdown in the late Seventies, around the time his first marriage broke up, and another of sorts when sheer accumulation of work filming Who Framed Roger Rabbit? became too much. But since he owns up to his vulnerability, you can hardly hold it against him. 'It's all true,' he says morosely. 'First nights really are first nights for me. Many's the time I've been standing in the wings, vomited into a fire bucket, wiped my mouth and walked on stage. It'll happen this time, don't worry.' So why not plump for something easier? 'Oh, I think I came back because of the risk. If I wasn't in this business, I'd probably be a bandit or robbing banks, living that kind of life. There's something satisfying in taking on something impossible, people saying you're crazy, then making it work and sharing it with an audience.'

He seems to hanker after a certain edge not found in film acting. 'Yeah, well,' he mutters, 'you can get away with a lot on film. A camera can read your mind. As long as you think the character's thoughts, you can convince a film audience. On stage you have to convey those thoughts, not through a tiny lens, but across a great hall.' He mulls this over. 'Course, I may have lost that knack completely.'

My guess is that he hasn't. Beneath the dithering, Hoskins often lets slip that he has a fair grasp of his capacities. This is not to say that he is being disingenuous about stage acting. For one thing he is dyslexic, which makes learning lines a real challenge. 'I can't skim a page,' he says. 'I have to read every word carefully and individually. It's slow going. Of course, by the time I get to the bottom of the page, I've got a good idea vocally what's there. I know how the words should sound.' But he is so used to film work, learning a few lines a day, then forgetting them, that he struggles to keep two hours of dialogue from Old Wicked Songs in his head. He hopes he pulls it off and enjoys the fact that his Hollywood stint gave him one thing: a name to adorn the marquee of a West End theatre, hitherto unconquered territory for him. 'I saw the play as a piece of studio theatre,' he muses. 'The fact the management see it as a West End show is encouraging. Because things aren't so good in the West End, either. The reports I've had from mates in shows, they say, "Well, it's a job, that's about it." Which sounds like Hollywood, know what I mean?'

It is certainly hard to envisage him separating from his family for long American jaunts. Hoskins gesticulates towards a pile of scripts, piled high at his feet on a low coffee table. 'I just keep kicking these,' he says. 'Know why? They're no good. Not one. Think about it. Name one film that's come out of Hollywood recently that you've thought, "Yessss!" There's one every now and then, but how many people are up for it? And I'm English, so I'm at the back of the queue.'

He thinks Hollywood will eventually make grown-up, substantial films with meaty roles again. 'But in the meantime, what do you do? Sit and wait out the dead period or go and create something yourself. If we start something in Britain, the big names will queue up to do something good. There's so much talent here. Look at Trainspotting. Cracking film. They made it for nothing. So we can do it.'

I want to believe him when he says he is committed to working in Britain in future. But his track record suggests he has always been a gadfly in the way he chooses his roles. He also has disarmingly little sense of his achievements to date. When I put it to him that he has delivered at least four performances anyone would be proud of, he looks genuinely bewildered. 'I never think like that, about what I've done. People have come up to me and spouted reams of speeches from The Long Good Friday and I haven't had the faintest idea what they're talking about. It's finished, it's over. Some of the things I've done, I remember the food on set rather than the work. I had a smashing lamb chop on one set. The chips were good on another.'

This vagueness about his career-path has other side-effects. He reports Norma Heyman's reaction when he told her about Old Wicked Songs: ' "Oh God!" she shouted. "I thought I'd got myself a partner, and now he's a bleeding theatrical!" ' He tells this as a joke, but one imagines Heyman, who really has been in the trenches of the British film industry for several years, might genuinely have been dismayed.

Planning ahead, then, has never been his strong point - which does not bode well for his ambitions to liven up the film industry and the theatre in Britain. 'I'm a bit of a maverick,' he says finally. 'I've just gone for the next job. I've even taken jobs because I was told the catering was good. Decent food? Put me down for that.'

I tell him as tactfully as I can that I know actors who plot career moves five years ahead. 'I know,' he says sombrely. 'And I haven't the faintest idea what I'll do next. I haven't got a five-minute plan, me.'